Cars today run on “gasoline” which has the hydrocarbons that work with the air and make the combustion possible, but why design engines like this, especially since the refining process is so arduous? Would it not have been easier and more logical to try using the crude oil straight from the Earth?
In: 16
Asphalt, that thick black goo they make streets out of, thats one of the things they ‘refine’ out of crude oil.
up to the 70s we guzzled gasoline and let all kinds of nasty chemicals fly free in the air, then we realized that’s why the sky in cities were so dark brown and acidic.
if you look at your car engine now there’s all kinds of tubes running here and there, you need an engineering degree to work on a car, because all that is to keep pollution down. (and they work SOOO much more efficiently now, a big V8 getting 8mpg hardly had 280 horse power, now you have family sedans pumping out 300 and getting 30mpg)
some of those big container ships with engines bigger than a house can run on ‘bunker’ oil but nobody seems to care what kind of pollution they do on the ocean.
think of gasoline as whisky, it starts out as soup that gets filtered, then distilled…and modern distilleries borrowed the invention of a collum with separation plates that lets various chemicals collect and siphon away at specific temptures for a very pure product.
Oh a major reason especially back then was the extreme variations of the quality, the volitilty of the liquid that was collected.
What made standard oil was that they chemical engineered a product that you could expect had a specific level of flamability.
in the mid 1800s thousands of people were horrificially burned, killed because when you poured oil into a lantern you had little idea whether it was like cooking oil or rocket fuel. serioiusly it was dangerous. one of the reasons whale oil was so popular was it was far more consistent. as a percent of population, as many people were killed filling, lighting or using gas lanterns, cook stoves, heaters, etc than are killed in car wrecks every year.
Cars today run on “gasoline” which has the hydrocarbons that work with the air and make the combustion possible, but why design engines like this, especially since the refining process is so arduous? Would it not have been easier and more logical to try using the crude oil straight from the Earth?
In: 16
Asphalt, that thick black goo they make streets out of, thats one of the things they ‘refine’ out of crude oil.
up to the 70s we guzzled gasoline and let all kinds of nasty chemicals fly free in the air, then we realized that’s why the sky in cities were so dark brown and acidic.
if you look at your car engine now there’s all kinds of tubes running here and there, you need an engineering degree to work on a car, because all that is to keep pollution down. (and they work SOOO much more efficiently now, a big V8 getting 8mpg hardly had 280 horse power, now you have family sedans pumping out 300 and getting 30mpg)
some of those big container ships with engines bigger than a house can run on ‘bunker’ oil but nobody seems to care what kind of pollution they do on the ocean.
think of gasoline as whisky, it starts out as soup that gets filtered, then distilled…and modern distilleries borrowed the invention of a collum with separation plates that lets various chemicals collect and siphon away at specific temptures for a very pure product.
Oh a major reason especially back then was the extreme variations of the quality, the volitilty of the liquid that was collected.
What made standard oil was that they chemical engineered a product that you could expect had a specific level of flamability.
in the mid 1800s thousands of people were horrificially burned, killed because when you poured oil into a lantern you had little idea whether it was like cooking oil or rocket fuel. serioiusly it was dangerous. one of the reasons whale oil was so popular was it was far more consistent. as a percent of population, as many people were killed filling, lighting or using gas lanterns, cook stoves, heaters, etc than are killed in car wrecks every year.
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